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Comment by quantumleaper | Hacker News Reader

Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.

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It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.

Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.

If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.

Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.

> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.

Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.

Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.

1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.

Making a mistake, even a pretty fundamental mistake, doesn't necessarily mean somebody is stupid. If you need to get really deep into theology before you can even be in a position to make the mistake, it's a mistake only a smart and educated person can make. The list of famous mathematicians who tried to prove the existence of god includes Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Gödel. A fool's errand, to be sure, but those were no stupid fools.

You don’t think that there were highly educated people in leadership roles in the Taliban or Viet Cong?

You might want to research the origins of the Taliban a little more.

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